Nuclear Energy: The Past, Present, and Future – Lab 060

Have you seen the gas prices in California? Have you seen the gas prices down the street?

Girl? They high.

If it's up, then it's up.

If it's up, then it's stuck. It's been pretty wild. I guess I'm gonna have to start biking everywhere.

Come on over to the biking community.

I know that's your favorite thing to do. I don't want to get on that bike.

You know, when gas prices start to go up, politicians and policymakers start talking about alternative forms of energy, which low key they should have been talking about anyway.

Right, huh huh. Because fossil fuels are a limited supply. We will eventually run out of fossil fuels, so we need some alternatives asap.

And one of those alternatives that often comes up is nuclear energy.

H I love it.

I know that's right in your wheelhouse.

It absolutely is.

But I'm always like I think, I know, I'm not quite sure.

You know a lot more than you think.

Well, prove it to me.

Okay, that's my mission for today. I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify. This is Dope Labs.

Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that makes us, hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy dosa friendship.

This week, we're talking about nuclear energy, and there's a lot of things about nuclear energy that I think people don't know. We generally know that it's very powerful, but we wanted to know specifically why it's so important, how it's regulated, and more of the applications.

Let's get into the recitation, all right, Listen, I'm gonna ahead and tell you most of the things I know about nuclear energy. I know a little bit from history, but mostly for call of duty. Okay.

My friend is a gamer okay.

And then second is from Marvel and we've already talked about this on Wakanda forever. Some of that stuff is not real, so I'm gonna really need you to separate back from fiction. For me, Tony Stark taught me a lot, but how much of it is really true?

Yes? So because of that episode, we know a little bit of the basics about nuclear energy. Where it comes from. You know it comes from the nucleus of an atom, but we really want to know a lot more, right, And I think that is a great segue into what do we want to know.

I know you're saying, yes, it comes from the nucleus of an atom, But how do we get to it a who's holding it? One atom? Multiple atoms at the same time sequentially? I have a questions. And then what about those halves if you're splitting them?

I think that's a very good question. I think I want to know more about the history of nuclear energy. I think I know a little bit of why we first started looking into it, but I really want to know why and what problem we were trying to solve and how we got to where we are today.

And like so many things, what's the potential, what's next? How is this being regulated? How do we ensure that it's equitable access to something if it has all the potential folks are saying it has. Okay, let's jump into the dissection. Our guest for today's lab is doctor Marina Robinson Snowden.

My name is doctor Marina Robinson Snowden.

I'm a senior engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applyve Physics Laboratory.

Like we said, we talked about the basics of nuclear energy in our episode Wakonda Forever, but we act doctor Snowden to take us back to high school physics class and explain to us the anatomy of an atom.

So you have protons and neutrons that are in the nucleus, right, and then outside of that nucleus you have electrons and inside of that atom, it takes a lot of energy to keep all of those different pieces together.

That's right. Atoms are the building blocks of all things. And just like doctor Snowden said, you have your nucleus of your atom, and that has neutrons and protons and they're all packed together really tightly, and then spinning around that nucleus is all of these electrons.

If you think about how all of that energy is holding those things together, the vibes are definitely right. We want to start thinking about how to capture and use that energy. Doctor Snowden says, there are a couple different ways.

So the first is something that I think we're all familiar with, which is kind of chemical reactions. So a chemical reaction is something where you are trying to remove an electron from an electron shell, right, So you're trying to kick off an electron from that atom package.

Right, that's chemical.

So think of fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels is a chemical reaction, and so you take that fuel and igniting it kicks off the chemical reaction. That's what's happening in our cars that aren't electric, you know, they're using gas from the pump. Those are fossil fuels, and when you turn your key, there's an ignition and that sets that fuel on fire. And what it does is produce a lot of heat, and that heat is the energy that is released from this reaction.

The byproduct of these reactions where we're burning that fuel are carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, nitric oxide, microparticles, a whole bunch of other environmentally unsafe compounds just you name it. Okay, the list goes on, and this is where we kind of get into greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

So in some scenarios you can access chemical energy through combustion or burning things. And another way is by leveraging all that energy that's holding the nucleus together, aka nuclear energy.

So some really smart people decades and decades ago, thought how can we leverage the energy that's inside of the nucleus and also inside of the atom itself. When you're thinking about nuclear we're not talking about electrons now, we're down in the nucleus, right, nuclear nucleus, that's what it means. So you're dealing with reactions that are happening inside of

And because chemical reactions are not as strong, we need a lot more fuel to burn.

So that's why nuclear energy is so promising because if you can find a way to break those nuclei apart and harness that energy, you can do things like create electricity, and you.

Can do it by using way less fuel. So that sounds really promising, right, But how is nuclear energy access? Doctor Snowden talked to us about the two ways this happens, fission and fusion.

And fission is exactly as it sounds.

You are trying to take a nucleus and break it apart, and when you rip it apart or break it apart, there's an energy release that's associated with that. That's what happens inside of nuclear reactors. So we're taking uranium or plutonium fuel, which are radioactive materials. We're doing a nuclear process on them to force those nuclei to break apart and give us that energy because we need that energy to create the heat to create the electricity downstream.

So what's happening in a nuclear reactor this fission process is it's a pretty simple process, but it's complex because it takes a lot of energy. So a neutron hits a uranium atom and that neutron causes the nucleus of the uranium atom to split. So when that fission happens, that split that nucleus, it releases a large amount of energy as heat. And as it's splitting, you remember we

The United States gets something like twenty percent of our electricity from reactors. Globally it is something like eleven percent.

That's a really big percentage, and it feels really important. And those are a lot of moving parts you just describe TT. Yeah, and doctor Snowden is driving home just how important those reactors are. H and all is making me think is that Osha or somebody should have come and stepped in in the town of Springfield because Homer symptom was reckless at his reactions. This is all such an intricate process. And that's just fission. Right when the

The second approach, though, is fusion where instead of trying to break the nuclei apart, you're actually trying to smash them together. And in that same way, to take lighter nuclei and smash them together, there's an associated energy release.

In order to get them to actually bind, they have to give up energy.

So that energy that's given up is the same thing that we're after. We're always after the energy release, whether we're talking about burning fuel, fissioning fuel, or fusing fuel.

And I'd love to do a detailed example of how fusion works, but we haven't quite messed with that yet. Fusion is still an experimental technology. Scientists and researchers are still trying to figure it out. But it seems like fission and fusion are both viable from a climate change perspective because they eliminate a lot of those greenhouse gas emissions we see with kimo cool energy and combustion and burning.

Yes, in the US we have ninety three nuclear reactors up and running right now, which is the most in the world. France is in second place with fifty six.

They can't compete where they don't compas or whatever that's saying is.

So.

Doctor Snowden said that the United States gets about twenty percent of our energy from reactors. But what does that mean? How much energy is that twenty percent of?

What?

You know?

How is it measured? Right?

So that twenty percent of electricity generated that she told us about is about seven hundred and ninety thousand gigawatt hours? That doesn't really mean much.

Okay, when I'm typically looking at a light build that's in like killowatt hours, and I think we can start with the prefixes, right, Yeah, killo just means a thousand, So a kilowatt is one thousand watts, and that's a measure of power. But a kilowatt hour is a measurement of energy. So that's how much energy something that takes one thousand watts needs in order to rent for an hour. So it's like a rate almost.

Absolutely, that's the difference between power and energy. Energy is power and then a unit of time.

So that's like miles versus miles per hour.

Yes, so you go from a distance to a distance per time, and that gives you a speed.

Okay, So now I understand the unit and the measure, give me something to anchor it to.

So for example, a typical electric dishwasher uses about two kilowat hours per load.

Okay, so I got that a Nissan.

Leaf electric car uses forty kilo why hours when fully charged.

But you told us that doctor Snowden was telling us about seven hundred and ninety thousand gigaway hours. So a kilo why hour is one thousand watts of power over an hour. A gigawatt hour is one million killowat hours.

So we go from kilowatts. So that's one thousand, there's megawats, so we're gonna skip over that. That's in the millions. Now we're at gigawatts. That's in the billions of watts per hour.

And so for those billion watts per hour, so that's gigawatt per hour, there are seven hundred and ninety thousand of those.

Seven hundred and ninety thousand of those billions.

Turn everything off.

Right, I'm turning off my computer right now, goodbye. But that still only makes up a fraction of US consumption. Remember that's only twenty percent, So I'm not gonna do the multiplication. I'm gonna let y'all do the multiplication because now we're getting into numbers that I cannot say. A gigawatt hour is a unit of energy that is one billion kilowatts of power sustained for one hour. In twenty twenty, the US consumed trillions. That's t r trillions of gigawatt hours.

All of this sounds great, right. It's a way to generate electricity that doesn't give us the negative effects of greenhouse gases, but I just noticed it not so fast. There are some other things that we need to be worried.

About, but that doesn't mean that this is free lunch, right There are risks associated with nuclear technology, and one of the big risks is the waste that's produced at the end of the day. So when you split a nucleus apart, you create these things called fission products, daughter products, those are some of the names that they're use. So that's like the waste, and these things are highly radioactive.

For a long time.

So there's questions about what is the long term disposal strategy for this waste, because there's a couple of different options. You can bury it deep inside of a hole right right now. We store it kind of in these spent fuel storage pools outside of reactors, but that's not a long term solution. But the politics of nuclear waste and spent fuel are non trivial. We've been battling them for

And we've seen catastrophic accidents occur a few times, one in Fukushima in twenty eleven, after an earthquake three Mile Island in nineteen seventy nine, which happened right here in the United States, an Chernobyl in nineteen eighty six because of a flawed reactor and errors in the actions of the technicians, and the event in Chernobyl was so long it was releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere for ten days, and it made it so that to this day, about

And that's what I remember from Call of Duty. They drop you into that zone, they put you in Chernobyl. Yeah, there's all these abandoned buildings and things in the grass has overgrown on this stuff because it hasn't been inhabited for so long.

Y'all gotta chill.

Children should not be playing. That should not only the guns, but also the atmosphere.

Cheeze. OK, that's crazy.

So, even though there are a lot of these potential upsides with nuclear energy, Like TT mentioned, there are some risks involved too.

Risks, they say, is the probability of the event, the consequences of the event, and the vulnerability of the asset. So even though the probability is very low, the consequences are so high. Radioactive fallout contaminating large swaths of areas, you have families displaced. There can be like generational impacts if there is a catas graphic accident. So those are some of the things that policymakers communities that are thinking about.

Hosting these facilities.

Right, whether we're talking about the reactor itself or the repository for the spent fuel, these are the things that they have to think about in terms of kind of the near term and long term benefits of the technology balance that with the risk.

When we talk about nuclear energy and splitting an atom and uranium plutonium. I think about radiation in the way I learned about it in the lab, and I remember when I first was going through training to work with radiation, I was like, oh, so worried and so you know, but I think it's important for people to understand that not all radiation is the same. There's a spectrum.

Yeah, So we're surrounded by radiation every day. You know, microwaves, radio waves, everything, But there are big differences between a microwave from your microwave and radiation that is potentially harmful to you. And I think once you have a grasp of that, then you can understand, Okay, what does this mean for nuclear energy? What does this mean for the byproducts and offshoots of these processes, and what's harmful and what's not. Could you tell us a little bit more

Because the energy the wavelength is so large relative to the size of your cells.

You good, you, goujie.

But when we start talking about ionizing radiation, those waves are really tight and tiny. So they're so small, so tight and so tiny that they have the ability to really get up close and personal with the cells in your body. They just touching all over them, and they can do a lot of damage.

And so exposure to that harmful ionizing radiation is what happened when we saw these accidents at nuclear reactors, so at three mile, at Chernobyl, at Fukushima. This is not the same as microwave waves. This is not the same.

Okay, so heat up to your hot pocket, You'll be all right.

But I think it's so important for people to understand like where we are on this scale, both in size of wave and in potential harm yep. And so I think that's a great way to think about risk, right, not just oh, a thing could happen, but how likely is it to happen, and if it happens, how devastating are the events? But also if we remove this from the equation overall, what does this mean for our electricity grid? What does that mean for day to day life in America?

That's a really good point because in twenty twenty, forty percent of the US's electricity came from natural gas twenty one percent came from renewables, so that's when hydrosolar, biomass, geothermal, and twenty percent came from nuclear and nineteen percent came from call.

You need kind of a constant energy source, something that can always run. There's these kind of classic lines about the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine. So those renewable sources there is a temporal component to them, whereas with a reactor, once you've built it and you've gotten the core up and running, it can go for you know, a long time, and that.

Can be kind of your assured energy.

Source and tc. This is on something that we say all the time, yep, Right, A lot of problems are not solved by one single solution, but there are multiple things working in lockstep to give you a reinforced solution. So even if one fails, you have some backups.

So I think the idea is to have a diverse fire portfolio with the lowest carbon footprint possible and being able to balance these near term and long term risk and benefits with the you know, global society in a way that mirrors our values today. Right, So you think about nuclear energy now versus then we have very vibrant conversations around equity and justice.

So if we're talking.

About where is this fuel being mined, where is this spent fuel being deposited, we have to think about whose communities are these, what seat do they have at the table. So you're seeing administration starting to adopt a lot of this language and this perspective on the way that we need to make energy policy. And it's different than kind of the nature of the conversations in the sixties and

Okay, so we've talked about nuclear energy and how it can be used to possibly replace some more harmful forms of fuel, but that's not why this form of energy harvesting was originally looked into.

The origin of our nuclear story really starts in World War Two, when the international community was trying to grapple with a rising Nazi power.

You had Adolf Hitler.

You saw the expansion and the genocide that he was inflicting on Europe, and at that time, you know, the nineteen thirties was a really active time from a nuclear perspective.

We were discovering stuff, y'all. We discovered fission. We discovered the chain reaction, which.

Means like you could sustain fission, you could have sustained energy output.

It wasn't just the one and done right. At the same.

Time, there was a significant worry that the Nazis were trying to develop a weapon that leveraged the nuclear reactions that we talked about. We were really worried about the Nazis pursuing that technology. And it was actually Albert Einstein that wrote a letter to FDR at the time alerting him of this. Right, let me put you up on game. From a scientific perspective, these things are happening. They could potentially use it for this I think we need to figure out.

What we want to do.

And the response of the US government was to establish what was called the Manhattan Project. So we decided we got to beat them to this technology. If this bomb is a real thing, we got to be the first to have it.

The Manhattan Project was started in nineteen forty two by the US government and it was also supported by the UK and Canadian governments as well to develop nuclear weapons. You know, this started as a really small project, but it grew to cost two billion dollars and employ over one hundred and thirty thousand people. There were project sites all over the three countries, and these project sites had not only research but testing as well.

And we can debate if that was the right policy decision, because I think as an engineer that's been participating more and more in the policy discussions, it's really important to acknowledge where choice lies.

None of these things are inevitable.

We have choices in the policy that we make, right, So we made a choice to invest in beating.

The Nazis to a nuclear bomb.

We established the Manhattan Project and really the first reactors that we saw on the scene were built in order to produce the plutonium fuel that was needed for the bombs. So it was only after the war ended, and again there was a policy decision. We tested the first nuclear weapon on the Trinity Site in Nevada in July of nineteen forty five. Not a month later did we drop it,

Right?

There's a lot of narratives, but once we decided to do that and the war was over.

You saw the international community shift from Okay, we have this technology now, right, we've discovered fission. We have these reactors. What if there's a role for them beyond nuclear weapons. It's just an energy sources, the way to make heat. But it makes heat a lot more efficiently than fossil fuels, right, or the other energy sources we had at the time. And remember we're talking like nineteen forty five fifty, so you saw the international community shift to this conversation of

The atomic age has moved forward at such a pace that every citizen of the world should have some comprehension of the extent of this development. If the peoples of the world are to conduct an intelligence search for peace, they must be armed with a significant facts of today's.

So, because they didn't want to create a world where nuclear bombs were all over the place and ready for use. Governments decided to use this power for good, not evil. But let's take a quick break and when we get back, we'll talk more about nuclear energy policy and what we're

From the very beginning, the conversation was about how do we promote the use of nuclear energy while also controlling the use, because what we did not want to do was to give a country reactor technology, to consult with them on expertise, only to see that country use that technology to fuel their own military nuclear program. That was not in the US interests nor the global interest, at least at the time of the discussion. So you saw

So when this treaty was signed, there were five countries that already had nuclear weapons, the United States, Russia, France, the UK, and China, and they all agreed to eventually disarm in good faith.

So at the time, we all agreed we did not want a world with nuclear weapons and we should work towards a world without it. So once you sign on to this agreement, there's a very heavy on site inspection regime where the IEA comes in and they do comprehensive inspections of all your different reactor facilities, all your nuclear facilities, reactors, enrichment, spent fuel pools, everything to make sure that you are

So now that the treaty is signed and countries are no longer developing nuclear weapons with their reactors, there became lots of different ways countries could start working together to share resources to produce use nuclear energy. Because spoiler alert nuclear reactors are expensive to build, and not everyone has the coins allocated for something like.

That, So when you're talking about these developing nations, it may not be in their ability at the time to finance a capital project like that, so you can have, you know, a more privileged nation come in and build that system. The idea though, is that they would allow inspection. They would allow those ie inspectors to come in and make sure it's being used for its intended purpose.

And beyond just building. Another piece of the puzzle is having the fuel the uranium, plutonium, et cetera that you outlined earlier TT Not everyone has that, so they may need to run over to a neighbor's for a cup of uranium.

It's not automatic that everybody needs to have every stage of that fuel cycle in their country.

So you can have a country.

That has a reactor, but maybe they don't have the enrichment capability. Maybe they don't have the ability to take uranium or out of the ground.

Every country doesn't need to have that.

Maybe we go into a trade agreement where I will provide that fuel to you and you just run it in a reactor, and then maybe I take the spent fuel from you in the back end. So there's been different configurations within these trade agreements or within these kind of energy export agreements that will allow certain parts of the fuel cycle and others. Ionizing radiation means it is energetic enough to remove an electron from your atoms. That's what it means to be ionizing. You can kick off

You know, we come in contact with ionizing radiation in very specific ways that is under the supervision of a medical professional, like X rays. A lot of people have gone in for X rays, but if you have, you know that parts of your body is covered with lead to try and block the parts of your body that you don't want. X ray to keep them from being exposed,

And what you're covering when you do that are those tissues that have cells that are constantly regenerating themselves or that are replicating, which is your breast tissue, your stomach, which is your gut lining and GI tract, and your ovaries if you have them. Because those things are constantly regenerating themselves, you're not making new arm you know what I mean. You're not making new arm meat, and so those things don't have to be protected in the same way.

An important piece that I wanted to highlight is the gendered component to the biological impact of radiation for women, because we have more high turnover organs relative to our male counterparts. Right, like I said, we have breasts, we have ovaries. What are the type of cancers that generate their right breast cancer or variant cancer, So we have a disproportionate impact when we talk about the effects of radiation.

I think that one of the things that I found surprising in making this lab was how many nuclear reactors there are. And doctor Snowden was talking about weighing the risks with the benefits and things like that, and so then we have to start thinking if nuclear energy is something that we want to use moving forward as one of our possibly main sources for electricity, that might possibly mean more nuclear reactors, and so that risk will always

Okay, okay, okay, it's time for the one thing. What's your one thing? This week.

Tt My one thing this week actually came from a Doe Blabs listener. Their name is Kristin Thomas and they are actually a part of the US rugby team. Okay, what yes, the US women's rugby team, And are they trying to recruit you possitively? You know, I'm a little strong, Simes.

That sounds great. I have plenty of shoes that I could get right on out the door and give another home.

What's your one thing?

My one thing this week is really touching into your domain. Tt uh okay, let's hear it. Okay, so you know how I like to chep it up in the kit. I was reading this article about this group of scientists in Maryland who have produced basically a knife. But it's not a knife like a steel knife or a ceramic knife. It's made out of hardened wood. What. Yes, And they're saying that it's sharper than a steel knife.

Is it gonna put splinters in my food?

Oh? I don't know about that. But they're saying that this hardened wood. I don't know what they did to it. They're saying it is twenty three times harder than like the natural wood. I don't know how they're developing it. I haven't read all into it. It was like a little skim bullet. But you know, are we about to go back to the wooden tool? You know what?

I kind of love that, I do. I do?

Yeah, I mean I'd like to see it, you know, like that that meme, like I'd like to see it.

I'd like to see it.

Yeah, I'd like to see it.

I think that's amazing.

I'm like, what type of material science? And that's from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland.

That's very cool. I know it to get you for your birthday.

All right, that's it for Lab sixty. Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and tell us what you thought. Also, you can call and give us an idea for a different lab you think we should do. Remember we like hearing from you. You can call or text us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two.

Eight and don't forget that. There is so much more to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheat cheat for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter. Check it out at Dope labspodcast dot com special thanks to today's guest expert, doctor Marina Robinson Snowden.

You can find her on Twitter at m R O b I N s n O w SO M Robin snow or check out her website at www dot Marina Robinson Snowden dot com.

And you can find us on Twitter and install at Dope Labs podcast.

TT's on Twitter and Instagram at d R Underscore t SHO.

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